How to get started with SEO

If you stopped promoting your content, would your traffic disappear to trickle? It’s a real worry for most bloggers and online business owners who feel like they’re on a hamster wheel of content creation.

If you feel like you’re trapped into creating and promoting new content for your website so you can be successful, search engine optimization might be a great solution for you!

Over the last seven years, I’ve helped business owners and bloggers use best practices from SEO to create sustainable, long-term traffic to their websites that allows them to take a step back from creating and promoting content to do other things in their businesses.

I’m here to help you understand a little more about SEO and get you started on the right track of knowing where to start to improve your website’s traffic from search engines so you can scale back your content creation to something that works for you.

Why You Need SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is the practice of optimizing your website and online presence to increase rankings in search engine results. In the most simple sense, SEO is about things like putting the right keywords in the right places on your website—but today’s SEO incorporates a lot more of a holistic approach to marketing to help increase your rankings in search engines.

Search engine optimization does a lot more than just helping your content get higher in search results though! Doing SEO:

Creates consistent traffic without you having to lifting a finger
Positions you or your brand as a leader and authority in your niche
Puts you in front of your target audience and qualified leads
Decreases the time you have to spend creating content
If you think about your goals for your website, I’m betting that all four of these benefits sound pretty awesome! SEO can help you reach your goals no matter what kind of website you have, how you monetize your site, or what niche you’re in!

Modern SEO is more than Keywords

I hate to burst the bubble of what SEO really is. It’s easier to think of SEO as the right keywords in the right places. While that’s part of it, keywords aren’t actually the thing that benefits your search traffic the most!

Even back in 2015, Moz’s survey that asked 150 SEO pros what they thought the most influential factors that go into ranking said that keyword optimization is only the third most important! Links back to your website and individual pages are the top two things that impact your content’s ability to rank in search engines, especially in competitive niches.

Instead of focusing on SEO as an afterthought of “I’ll just pepper some keywords into this post,” SEO strategy needs to be part of your content creation process from the beginning to get the most traffic to your site.

In 2019, the most important things in SEO are:

Signals about your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, both on your site and on the internet at large
Content that is helpful, useful, and engaging — written with the language your audience uses and understands
Your website is easy to navigate on all devices and talks to search engines in a way they understand
What this means for you is that building an authority website is one of the most important things you can do you create sustainable, long-term traffic because it covers all three of those things!